Doing better–bank error fixed. Still depressed as hell, but less stressed at least. Still need to fix Part D and Mass Health, but my team can do a lot of that for me. And my SSI back pay came in, so I have nearly $2000, thank the gods.
Finally on the waiting list for Sheppard Pratt. It’s a long wait, but at least I’m on the list.
And my weight is down into the 120’s. The upper 120’s, but still. I know it’s really screwed up to be happy about that…but I am.
I can’t do this. I’m trying so hard, and I just can’t.
The admissions person from Sheppard Pratt called because she wanted my secondary insurance info. But I still haven’t fixed the Mass Health error, so probably now I won’t be able to go to Sheppard Pratt.
And I don’t have time to fix that tomorrow because I need to fix my bank account. The fraudulent charges haven’t been removed yet, so I have negative money and no groceries.
And I’m hella suicidal. I just can’t deal with my life because everything is fucked to hell. I just need to be dead so fucking bad.
Also I’m pretty sure I’m just shitting out my bowels at this point…but I can’t lay off the laxatives. Literally CANNOT. I think I’ve taken at least 16 today, maybe 20. How did it get this bad? It’s just the only thing calming me down. I need help but I can’t tell my team because I can’t face admitting that I’ve been lying to them for months about whether I was relapsing into the ED. I’m a fucking liar, and I’m disgusting, and I need to be dead.
Help.
I’m completely overwhelmed with life right now.
We still haven’t heard from Sheppard Pratt about whether they’ll accept me. Hopefully by the end of the week…but maybe not. I don’t know why, but I’m terrified they won’t take me, that I’m either too sick or not sick enough.
And then there’s Social Security and Medicare that I’m trying to deal with. I have been so out of it I didn’t notice I’ve only been getting 1/4 of the Social Security money I’m supposed to for the last several months, which is why my money situation has been so fucked. They also screwed with my Part D Medicare plan (prescription drug coverage) without telling me, so I have to get them to fix that too.
The woman was so rude on the phone yesterday that I started sobbing–I never do that. She just kept bullying me about why I didn’t fix the problem earlier and how could I not have noticed I wasn’t getting the right amount for 5 months and so forth. HELLO I HAVE A PSYCHIATRIC DISABILITY I CAN’T DEAL WITH SHIT ASSHOLE.
So I apparently have to go to their office–45 minutes away, on a different bus system that doesn’t intersect with mine, and the office is only open part-time–with my lease and utility bills, which they’ve never asked for before. Now in paranoid that they’re going to say I have income I don’t actually have and therefore I’m not eligible for Social Security. Then I’d lose all my insurance too. I know I’m probably catastrophizing, but I can’t help it. When I applied for food stamps, they accused me of fraud because my income was less than my rent, even though I told them my family pays my rent but not food costs.
On top of all of that, I’m having the kind of nightmares that make me want to rip my brain out through my nose. Hospital nightmares. The latest was one where I was completely naked, alone in the room with a male staff person–a doctor, I think. He told me very matter-of-factly how he was going to stick needles in my body and under my fingernails and rape me repeatedly. I managed to get past him and out of the room, running naked down the hallway, but I was locked in because it was a hospital. I told a nurse what he said, and she decided I was psychotic and forced antipsychotics down my throat.
And I’m coping with all this via my eating disorder. I’m eating enough in front of people in my team that they don’t realize this is an ED relapse. They think I’m just depressed and have no appetite. I’m at a “normal” weight, after all, though it’s dropping slowly but steadily. I’m abusing laxatives pretty seriously. I’ll leave the details to your imagination, but it ain’t pretty. I’ve been purging occasionally, but not regularly and not coupled with binges. It’s surprising to me–even in my other restrictive relapses, I’ve had an insatiable urge to binge, but now I have very little desire to. I always thought of myself as bulimic, not anorexic, even when I met the diagnostic criteria for AN.
Right now, I feel like my ED is the only thing giving me stability, and I don’t want anyone to take it away from me. At the same time, though, I want somebody to notice and be concerned. I don’t think my Windhorse team has much experience with EDs–people who do would see a 30 lb weight loss, even if it only puts me in the normal BMI range, as a red flag given my ED history. I guess I want validation that I’m sick even though I’m at a “normal” weight. I wish that didn’t matter to me.
I just can’t take much more. People were not engineered to live under this much stress all the time. I’m coming apart–trying desperately to hold on, but my strength is giving out.
Tonight I’m so angry I can’t think straight. I’m angry I can’t get the help I need.
I want to lash out and hurt the people trying to help me. I hate that urge, so instead I want to hurt myself.
I know I need too much. Or I feel that way. I’ve tried so hard to convince myself that I’m not too much, but now pretty much the whole universe tells me I’m too much.
My family. They’re finally cutting me off at the end of the year. My grandfather has paid a ton of money for my treatment, and he wants to retire. I get that. But what do I do about the fact that I’m still in need of treatment?
I’m trying to get treatment on my own. Right now I need residential care for the depression and the trauma issues. And theoretically the eating disorder.
But then there’s Medicare, telling me I need too much. Medicare will cover psychiatric hospitalization, but their definition of “hospital” is so narrow it covers only locked units. It probably sounds silly and overblown to everyone when I insist that I cannot go to a locked unit. Oh, there goes Sara with her manipulative melodrama again; god, we’re all so sick of hearing it.
But I was beaten to a pulp in a psychiatric hospital and then told by the staff to forget about it. Then I was sexually assaulted every night for months. EVERY NIGHT, you bureaucratic bastards. You wouldn’t be able to go to another locked unit if that had happened to you.
But it doesn’t matter what happened to me. I’m crazy. I have no value to anyone. So it doesn’t matter what happened to me.
It doesn’t matter that the help I need is out there because I can’t afford it. It doesn’t matter how badly I need it it doesn’t matter that I’m teetering on the cliff about to fall off. It doesn’t matter if I die because I’m not worth anything anyway.
There’s a rather heated debate about sustainability happening on the listserv for a pagan group I’m a member of.
I want to smack most of them.
The whole discussion reeks of rich privilege. “Anyone can be a healthy vegetarian if they get protein from diverse sources.” “Buying local is what everybody should do.” “Everybody should use natural medicine because it’s better for people and the environment.”
On an idealistic basis, I tend to agree with them. (I do, however, reject the blanket statements about everybody. Logical fallacy much?) But they’re flat-out missing the fact that there are a hell of a lot of people, even in the First World, who can’t afford it.
I’ve been a vegetarian for more than 10 years and know a lot about what works for my body. I also know it’s not fucking cheap. Extracting concentrated proteins from vegetable sources involves a fair bit of processing, and that increases cost to consumers.
I’d love to eat nothing but organic local produce. Sometimes I can afford local produce from the co-op, but usually it’s whatever’s on sale at the neighborhood Stop & Shop. I have to chooses this because otherwise I can’t pay my gas bill or buy food for my dog.
I wish I could try more alternative medical treatments, as my results with mainstream medicine have been mostly disappointing. But we have this while insurance system in the US. A visit to my mainstream primary care provider costs me nothing, and a month worth of meds costs me $5.00. The alternative medicine doctor Windhorse wanted me to see would cost me $450. Considering I live on $473.73 per month, that’s not really feasible.
It’s fine to suggest that these things are, in general, good things to do for yourself and the environment. But when you put the words “everyone should” into those sentences, then you exclude and shame the people who don’t have the resources to do those things.
By all means, let’s talk about the environment and how to improve it. But let’s also talk about privilege and be aware of it so we can check it at the door.
God, I am so on edge tonight. It’s mostly hormonal, and I’m trying to remind myself of that. It just isn’t helping, and my psychiatrist is having me do this month-long hormone test…which means I can’t take any hormones to relieve this.
I’m mostly stressing about money right now. There’s not enough of it. See, right before Housemate moved out, she wrote herself a check from the household account. This was legit; we do it when we spend our own money on shared expenses. But she didn’t enter it in the register, so I didn’t know she’d written it. (Annoyingly, we can’t do online banking with the Windhorse account, so I couldn’t check the balance easily.) So that meant I ended up bouncing a couple checks. Team Leader fixed it, but now I’m short for the month. My personal account is also short because it’s the end of the month, and I spent a lot of money adopting Winston and getting stuff for him.
Meanwhile, I’m supposed to be moving on Friday, and I can’t afford the movers. Not that I’ve actually gotten a single fucking moving company to pick up their phones or return my voicemails. So maybe the not affording it part doesn’t matter, since I don’t actually have movers. Does this constitute justifiable homicide? Somebody please tell me it does, ’cause I really need to rip somebody’s lungs out right now.
Then there are the bills. None of them are that high, but if I pay them, there’s no chance I can afford the movers.
The fees for my kung fu class are due the first of the month. Plus there’s the weekend kung fu camp in August that’s another $100. I really want to go, but how in the hell am I going to afford it? I don’t even know if I can afford regular kung fu classes next month.
Let’s not even mention how expensive food is. Dunno how I’m going to afford that either.
God, I feel like this huge failure. You’d think I’d be able to handle this stuff by now. It’s normal stuff, but I fuck it up. And to think, a couple weeks ago I was considering going back to college. Like I’m gonna be able to manage that when I can’t even keep my bank accounts in order.
Also, my neck/head/shoulders are killing me, mostly on the left side. There’s this pulsing pain with sparks of what feels like either extreme cold or heat. I’ve been seeing a chiropractor, but I’ve only seen him twice so don’t know if it works yet. I’ve been taking every OTC pain med in the book. They take the edge off but don’t really fix it.
I want to binge and purge, but there’s no food left in the house because I’m too fucking broke. I want to cut, but I know that’s not a good idea. Fuck. I know it’s just hormones, but srsly, why does my endocrine system feel the need to host a murderous mutiny in my brain once a month? This fucking sucks.
Kat
I’ve totally messed up my money.
I’m really ashamed to admit to this. Like, a LOT. I come from a family that drilled money management into me–my grandfather’s the VP of investments at a major brokerage firm, and my mother always told me at great length about her money problems and how we were about to be living on the street–when I was in elementary school. So there’s a lot of panic and shame happening.
When I was living at my last apartment, I had my rent autodrafted from my checking account so I didn’t have to worry about remembering to send it on time. When I moved in the fall, I thought I called the bank to get them to stop the autodraft. I’m not sure if I forgot or if something got messed up on their end–probably I just forgot.
I haven’t been paying much attention to my account. I was in a pretty bad depression and just couldn’t be bothered to do it, not that that’s a good excuse. Apparently the rent check was still being autodrafted from my account every month, and I didn’t realize it. Then there was a screw-up with my SSI/SSDI, and I had no income for the 3 months it took to straighten that out. Well, apparently the last autodraft caused an overdraft, and the bank shut down my account. I just got the back checks from Social Security now that the problem with SSI/SSDI has been straightened out, but the ATM wouldn’t even let me deposit the money.
I’ve left a voicemail with the property management company about getting a refund for the autodraft rent checks, but they’re impossible to get in touch with. I know I need to go sort this out with the bank, but I’m too panicked and ashamed. I’m afraid they’re going to accuse me of fraud and not let me have an account anymore, and then I could lose my SSI/SSDI. I’m panicked about not having money and ending up homeless–to the point that I’m having suicidal thoughts. I know I need to just grow up and deal with it, but I can’t. God, I just fail at life. I’ve messed everything up now.
The Life You Save May Be Your Own 